Kashmir region reels from flooding

Extent of devastation of main city in Indian side revealed while in Pakistan inundation now affects two million people.

12 Sep 2014 13:06 GMT

The main city in Indian-administered Kashmir has "drowned completely" under floodwaters, according to a senior official, with the deadly inundation now affecting about two million people in neighbouring Pakistan and threatening its all-important cotton industry.

The floods began in Kashmir after heavy monsoon rains and are now progressing downstream through Pakistan, inundating thousands of villages and large areas of important farmland in the country's breadbasket.

This year's floods in Kashmir are the deadliest in the region in 50 years and up to 100,000 people are still cut off in the mountainous terrain.

The waters are beginning to recede, revealing the extent of the devastation in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-administered Kashmir.

The waters are beginning to recede, revealing the extent of the devastation in Srinagar [Faiz Jamil/ Al Jazeera]

"Srinagar has drowned completely, it's unrecognisable. Almost everything is in ruins, it is just unimaginable," Mehraj-Ud-Din Shah, State Disaster Response Force chief of Kashmir region, told AFP by phone.

"But even now, about 100,000 people are believed to be stranded in different places," he said.

Srinagar has also been hit by looting, leading some householders to risk their lives and stay with their homes to protect their property.

Jamal Ahmed Dar, who lives close to Srinagar's Dal Lake, said that his neighbours had already caught two looters red-handed.

"We came across and then caught up with two young men on a boat who we didn't recognise," he said.

"When we searched them, we found they had cash and other belongings that they couldn't account for. We gave them a bit of a slap, took the stuff back off them and then handed it over to the rescue coordinators."

An AFP correspondent witnessed two men on a raft made out of a plastic water tank trying to break into a house in the upmarket Jawara Nagar neighbourhood before they were chased away by locals who pursued them on a flimsy wooden boat.

Pakistan's situation

Across the border in Pakistan, more than 450 people have been killed and the country's Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said just short of two million people have been affected by the floodwaters.

The figure includes both those stranded at home and those who fled after the floods hit.

More than 140,000 people have been evacuated from towns and villages around Punjab, Pakistan's richest and most populous province.

This year's floods in Kashmir are the deadliest in the region in 50 years and up to 100,000 people are still cut off [Faiz Jamil/ Al Jazeera]

Authorities have made plans to make holes in strategic dykes to divert the floodwaters away from Multan, a city of two million inhabitants and the nerve centre of Pakistan's cotton and textiles industry, a vital export earner.

Pakistan's Ministry of Water and Power has issued fresh flood warnings for the river Indus at Guddu and Sukkur, downriver from Multan in Sindh province.

The Sukkur area saw some of the worst of the devastating floods of 2010, the worst in Pakistan's history, when the waters swamped 160,000sq km of land - an area bigger than England - and cost the country nearly $10bn.

About 1,800 people were killed and 20 million affected.

Analysts have said this year's floods so far do not appear to be on the same scale, but thousands of people are still facing life in relief camps until the waters recede.

The Pakistani army, which often plays a leading role in disaster relief, said seven of its helicopters were engaged in rescue work around Multan and Jhang, upriver.

Troops have dropped more than 50 tonnes of rations around Punjab, the Pakistan military said in a statement, and mobile medical teams are treating those affected by the floods.